The end of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat! (1980)

From the May 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

As everyone knows, there has been a Shakespeare industry for centuries. Thousands of academics—some wise, some foolish, some honest, some crooked—have made a nice living out of it. But it took a long time for a similar industry to develop about Marx; for most of the century since he died, the groves of academe in the main held a conspiracy of silence. He wasn't worth mentioning to students—who in turn became professors who were able to pass on their own ignorance to succeeding generations. Suddenly, in the last decade or two, all that has changed. The reasons need not bother us, but it's enough to make an SPGB cat laugh to find that there is now a flourishing Marx industry among circles which not so long ago "professed": "Marx? Never heard of 'im!"

Every facet of the sage's life and works is explored and there is no end to the discoveries about the subsequent career of his third cousin twice removed; or about the bastard whom he fathered on the domestic servant and who was looked after by the undoubtedly kindly Engels. It is true that all these scribblers seem to know everything except the one thing that Marx really spent his life on: socialism. Ask ten professors of politics to tell you what socialism is and you will get ten different answers, each one as stupid as the rest. A few months ago, for example, there was an attack on Marxism in the Observer by no less a personage than the editor-in-chief. Predictably, this brought an article the following week by E. P. Thompson (who is too big for the paper to ignore) who had no difficulty in showing that Conor Cruise O'Brien is an ignoramus. Sadly he also showed that he too has his faults. The author of The Making of the English Working Class, which received the high praise that was its due when reviewed in this journal some years ago, can still think that a Marxist can possibly associate with the reformists in the Labour Party or the SWP.

As is the nature of an industry, those who engage in it are always looking for products that the competition has not dealt with. So we find that the literati take their magnifying glasses to pore over every odd phrase that Marx wrote from his youth (and like ordinary mortals, Marx too had to grow up—and learn). So we get learned tomes discussing what exactly the great man meant in Chapter XYZ, line 123 of the Critique of the Gotha Programme or some such.

The matter of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is even more ridiculous. The phrase was not intended for, and not used in, one of his books or major pamphlets, but was merely a remark used en passant in the course of correspondence. This however has not prevented the phrase being analysed and dissected ad nauseam. Can there be a dictatorship of the great majority? Whom would they dictate over in the classless society of socialism? Did Marx really mean "dictatorship" in the sense in which we understand the term or was he using it in the manner in which it was understood in ancient Rome? One can only assume that in his grave in Highgate, Marx is saddened to think that a careless phrase, one that indeed seems rather less than meaningful to us, should occasion so much bother to generations then unborn.

Unfortunately, it is not only foolish academics who seize on such phrases. People like Lenin (who had at any rate studied Marx) and Stalin (who had no time to read, being too busy butchering the Russian proletariat) needed these obscure phrases to lend authority to their tyrannical capitalist regimes. Lenin and his so-called Communist Party made it quite clear that they thought it perfectly correct to run a dictatorship and call it democracy. This, they said, was what Marx meant by the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. And this in turn meant that Lenin and his grislier successors could claim to be Marxists when by every reasonable understanding of what Marx spent his life writing about, and fighting for, they were anti-Marxists who were running a dictatorship over the proletariat—like Hitler. (In a sense, even worse, Hitler could at any rate say that millions of proletarians had voted him into power in an election in 1933; something that has never happened in the entire history of the Union of Capitalist Soviet Republics.)

However, the mask has now been taken off, very quietly. Russia, which always claimed to be the supreme example of whatever Marx is supposed to have meant by the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, has now abandoned that claim. At last, the official news from Moscow, from no less authoritative a source than the Sovietskaya Vooruzhennye Sily (p. 409). Most readers will no doubt be fully familiar with this journal but, for those who are not, it is the official publication of the Institute of Military History of the Soviet Ministry of Defence—and you can't get more official than that. Here is the passage in question: "Great changes have occurred in the Soviet political system. Our socialist state, which emerged as a dictatorship of the proletariat, has become an all-embracing national state expressing the interests and the will of the entire nation. As a result of this, the Soviet Armed Forces have become the weapon of our all-embracing state, a reliable defender of all classes and strata of Soviet society. Their social and class base has been widened. The union of the armed forces and the nation has been cemented further".

There we have it, After 60 inglorious years, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is now pronounced dead. Out of the ashes we now have a socialist, classless society? On the contrary, our glorious armed forces are there to protect "all classes and strata of society". Russia even has strata as well as classes, unlike our own capitalist state. It will not be necessary to point out all the significance of the remarkable passage quoted but it is worth mentioning that the dateline of the issue is Moscow 1978. Did the glorious Soviet people have some sort of referendum in which they joyously voted out of existence the glorious Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which they had joyously upheld in all those free elections ever since Lenin smashed up the Constituent Assembly in 1918? If so, this great event went unreported. The Morning Star still knows nothing about it, which is remarkable ignorance even by their standards. It is probable that about 250 million Russian members of the working class who are unlikely to read Sovietskaya Vooruzhennye Sily, haven't noticed the change either.

L. E. Weidberg

Government by Labour. (1920)

From the February 1920 issue of the Socialist Standard

A question which has recently aroused considerable controversy is, "Can Labour Govern?"

Socialists are not so much concerned with the question of whether Labour can govern as whether it should, or, to put it in a better way, whether Labour need govern. And on examination of the facts the only possible conclusion we can arrive at is that it need not—and should not.

It is significant that neither of those who have hitherto contributed to the discussion have defined their terms. In this they are quite consistent with their past record. For when apologists of capitalism and their henchmen—the self-styled "labour leaders"—are discussing a given subject, they never attempt to define the terms which they use; the only apparent reason for this is that they know that to do so would be to remove the blinkers from the eyes of those to whom they are appealing.

However, I will rectify the omission.

The word "Govern" means (according to Blackie's "Concise English Dictionary"): "To direct and control; to regulate by authority; to keep within the limits prescribed by law or a sovereign will; to influence; to direct; to restrain; to keep in due subjection; GRAM., to cause to be in a particular case, or to require a particular case.—v.i. To exercise authority."

The italics are mine.

There is no need to worry over the question: "Who does Churchill (who started the controversy) and his gang want to govern?" We all know that. But seeing that the spokesmen of the Labour Party are all so greatly concerned to maintain their ability and their right to govern (when they get the chance) it is natural to ask "Who is it that the Labour Party wish to 'keep in subjection?'" Seeing that the Labour Party, both officially and in the utterances of its representatives, has no conception of politics other than the capitalist view, and seeing, further, that there is no class beneath the working class to be oppressed, obviously it can only be the workers themselves that the Labour Party desires to "keep in due subjection."

Now, in asserting that Labour need not govern it is necessary to submit an alternative. That alternative is Administration.

But before describing this let us state the facts referred to above. They have been already stated numberless times, but it is essential that they be restated, even to the point of weariness, until such time as the workers take the action shown to be necessary by these facts.

1. Society is, broadly speaking, divided into two classes, the slave class and the slave-owning class.
2. Between these two classes there is a conflict of interests—centred around the sale and purchase of labour-power—which can be ended only by the abolition of the slave-owners, i.e., the capitalist class.
3. No one but the slaves themselves can abolish the capitalist class, and so doing achieve the freedom of the workers.
4. As the slave class, i.e., the working class, is the last class to be emancipated, there is no other class to be exploited, hence the need for government automatically disappears. 

Now for our alternative proposal—Administration.

The same dictionary says that to administer is "to manage or conduct as chief agent . . . " and states that the word is derived from the Latin ministro, to serve.

The difference, then, between Administration and Government is that the first serves the people and the other represses them. A good example of Administration is to be found in the Constitution of the S.P.G.B.

The control of the affairs of the Party is vested entirely in the membership of the Party. We have certain officials who are responsible for the execution of the instructions given them by the Party. If they fail in this work, or do it to an unsatisfactory manner, they can be removed from office at any time the Party thinks fit.

Apply this principle to the affairs of society, and the point of this article is perceptible at once. While we do not dispute the ability of the master class to govern, we do affirm that they cannot administer, for such a function must necessarily be performed in the interests of the workers, and hence can only be carried out by the workers themselves.

It is self-evident—in view of the state of affairs in "pre-war" times, of the Sidney Street fiasco, of the innumerable war scandals, of the gambles of Mesopotamia and Gallipoli, and the post-war position in which society is plunged, that the real Administration can be born only when the proletariat, having seized political power, use it for the purpose of making the means of production the common property of the whole of society, and proceed to administer them for the common welfare of all. Then the need for the State, for government—"Labour" or otherwise—and the "keeping in due subjection," will vanish, and mankind will at last be free.

Hutch.

How much has British Capitalism changed? (1974)

From the June 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Outwardly capitalism in Britain looks very different from what it was seventy years ago. No longer the centre of an Empire with a population of 400 millions, it is now a junior partner in Europe. Its navy, its trade and its currency no longer rule the world.

Equally great changes inside Britain reflect technical developments that have taken place in all the industrialized countries. Agriculture has shrunk from over 2 million farmers and workers to about 400,000, coal-mining from nearly a million to 300,000, textiles from 1½ million to less than half that number. The army of over two million domestic servants has largely disappeared, only to a relatively small extent replaced by the 730,000 employed in hotels and catering.

The motor-car has ousted the horse-drawn vehicle, new sources of energy have diminished the importance of coal, air transport has cut into rail and shipping. Among the industries that have grown is the metals, machinery and vehicles group, up from 1½ to 3½ million workers. The technical developments have equally affected the work itself. Even in occupations which bear the same names many workers are using materials, tools, machines and processes which did not exist seventy years ago.

In the structure of industry the trend towards concentration, foretold by Marx, which was going on in the latter part of the nineteenth century has continued, and indeed speeded up since joining Europe became an issue. In a long list of industries, though the number of separate companies may still be considerable, more than half the total output is controlled by a mere handful of them.

In brewing there are still 87 separate companies but the industry is dominated by half-a-dozen very large groups. The 2700 building societies of 1883 have been reduced to 450 "but the top 33 account for nearly 86% of assets" (Times 11 April 1974). The 207 private banks of 1884 had become 40 in 1904 and now the scene is dominated by the 'big four" joint-stock banks.

One form taken by concentration has been the nationalization of several big industries, but nationalization has also changed its form. Up to the nineteen-thirties Labour Party policy was to apply the government-department system of control used by the Liberals and Tories when they nationalized telegraphs and telephones. This was then replaced in Labour Party plans by the Public Board form of administration (likewise borrowed from the Liberals). It was supported by the argument that it would free management from close government interference and free the government from involvement in disputes over wages, neither of which has happened. Now the Labour Party has moved towards the system of government shareholding and government directorships in private companies, based on the Liberal Government's shareholding in Anglo-Persian Oil (now British Petroleum) before the 1914 war.

The powerful trend towards concentration produced another reversal of Labour Party policy. Traditionally they were "anti-monopoly" and in the early nineteen-twenties it was possible for a Labour Party spokesman, J. R. Clynes, Chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party and a minister in the first two Labour Governments, to declare that they preferred a large number of small capitalists to a small number of large ones, something quite outside the realm of practical politics today. (Ironically Clynes made this declaration in the preface to a booklet with the title The Failure of Karl Marx.)

While technical changes in industry have affected all countries there is one respect in which British capitalism has got out of line. This is in the rate of growth of production. After allowing for price changes, production per head of the population is about three times the level of 1904 in USA and only double in Britain. While the annual rate of growth has been increasing, from 1.3% a year at the beginning of the century to 2.4% a year in 1960-66, many other countries have shown much faster growth. Mr. Michael Forres, Research Fellow of the City University, in an article in Lloyds Bank Review (Jan. 1971) concluded that "Britain, the richest country in the world up until 1900 in per capita terms, can well be described now as being the poorest country in industrialized Western Europe, excluding Italy". Many reasons have been suggested, including low capital investment, but there is wide disagreement about it.

The rate of increase of production needs to be seen in a proper perspective in relation to both capitalism and Socialism. Even a sustained 2.4% a year would double production in under thirty years. But capitalism does not and cannot provide sustained growth. It depends on ability to sell the goods and therefore suffers from periodic depressions. And twice in this century world wars have taken half the workers out of producing means of life to producing means of destruction, not only of life but also of the means of production. And in peace time a large proportion of the workers are producing armaments, manning the armed forces or engaged in financial or other occupations necessary to capitalism but not to Socialism. If resources and human labour were redirected the output of useful goods and services could be doubled, and the rate of growth increased if society so desired.

The question to what extent inequality of income and ownership have changed since 1904 is difficult to answer because, as those who study the study still emphasize, reliable information is inadequate.

On the inequality of incomes Chiozza Money (Riches and Poverty, 1906) made a tentative estimate that in a population of 43 million in 1904 some 4 million persons received 48½% of the total national income and 38 million persons received the other 51½%. Figures published in Fabian Facts for Socialists (1944) indicated that by 1937 there had been a moderate lessening of inequality: "over two fifths of the personal income was appropriated by little more than one tenth of the total population." Since then larger shifts have been shown in other estimates. Roy Jenkins (New Fabian Essays 1970, p.73) claimed that there had been "a great advance towards equality . . . in the past twelve years", but another writer, R. J. Nicholson, in his examination of the available information concluded that the tendency towards greater equality ceased after 1957 (Wealth, Income, Inequality 1973, p.103). And C. A. R. Crosland, a Minister in the present Labour Government, has admitted that "even after six years of Labour rule Britain in the nineteen-seventies is conspicuous for its persistent and glaring inequalities" (Sunday Times, 10 March 1974).

On the ownership of wealth Chiozza Money estimated that in 1904 one-seventieth of the population owned far more than half the total and that "probably" nearly the whole was owned by 4,400,000 persons. A figure used in the Labour Party's Election Programme 1918 was that 10% of the population owned 90% of the wealth.

Current figures are presented by the Inland Revenue Department, but they are not in a form clearly comparable with the earliest ones. In the House of Commons (5 July 1973) a question to the Chancellor of the Exchequer produced figures showing that 10% of the population owned 77% in 1960 and 72% in 1970, but this is not shown as a continuous trend.The figure was down to 73% in 1966 and up again to 75% in 1968. Also it is maintained by Professor Harbury of the City University that changes in ownership are "likely to have taken the form of the rearrangement of wealth within families rather than a switch from rich to poor" and that "the basic situation has not changed much since the 1920's" (Financial Times, 28 Feb. 1974).

But all such figures have to be taken in relation to the Socialist case. While it is the declared aim of the Labour Party to bring about a more egalitarian capitalism this is not the aim of Socialists, and even if achieved it would not solve the problems of the working class. Capitalism is not more "capitalist" in Germany and France because income inequality is greater than in Britain, nor less "capitalist" in America because, as regards ownership of wealth, "it is the British distribution which is more unequal than the American — and quite substantially so" (Wealth, Income, Inequality, p.159).

The means of production and distribution are owned by the capitalist class not by the workers. The class relationship is not materially altered because many workers now own their own homes and the houses are better furnished. The class struggle has not disappeared and the need for Socialism is urgent, as it was seventy years ago.

Edgar Hardcastle

Bernard Shaw and Socialism (1927)

From the September 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

A few days ago I picked up an old copy of "Bernard Shaw," by Holbrook Jackson, and in it I came across a quotation from a lecture given by Shaw in 1896, which it struck me was worth quoting again before I forgot it, owing to the bearing it has upon Shaw's conception of what Socialism would be like. The need to publish this statement again is the more urgent as there is a tendency, even among many who claim to accept the Marxian outlook, to regard Shaw as the arch-socialist.

In December, 1896, Shaw lectured at Kelmscott House, Hammersmith, on "What Socialism will be like," and his opening remarks, which I am quoting, are taken from the report published in the "Labour Leader" of December 19th, 1896:

My lecture will be very short. It consists of three words—I don't know. Having delivered it, by way of opening a discussion, I will proceed to make a few remarks. The first thing that strikes one in discussing the matter with a Socialist—if you have a critical habit of mind, as I have, professionally—is the superstitious resemblance of the notion your ordinary Socialist has of what Socialism will be like to the good old idea of what heaven will be like! If you suggest that under Socialism anybody will pay rent or receive wages your ideal Socialist jumps on you. If I venture to suggest that such questions as who shall be allowed to live on Richmond Hill under Socialism, it will have to be settled much as it is to-day, by seeing who will will pay most to live there, such an eminent and enlightened Socialist as Mr. Hyndman immediately loses his temper, and retorts that that is a disgusting middle-class idea.

Here you have a view entirely different from that which sees in Socialism a state of society in which the means of production will have ceased to be the private monopoly of a small class of wealthy people, and will have become the common property of all—socially owned. Where there is wages and rent there cannot be social ownership, though there there may be those highly developed forms of capitalism—Nationalisation and Municipalisation.

Gilmac 

Green writings from Wall (1995)

Book Review from the January 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Green History -  a reader in environmental literature, philosophy and politics by Derek Wall (Routledge, 1994)

Ninety-six extracts from a wide selection of writers of many periods have been assembled into nineteen groups, each with an introduction by Derek Wall.

The topics of the groups range from "Ecology and early urban civilization" to "Philosophical holism". They are intended to cover the full spectrum of "Green" attitudes and beliefs and, as such, they offer a valuable insight into the thinking of those people who have decided to associate themselves with the broad ecology movement.

What is clearly demonstrated, however, is that concern for the earth, for nature, is nothing new. Pre-civilized peoples knew—and still know—the extent to which it is was necessary to live in harmony with the flora and other fauna of their area of the planet. But ancient civilisations, although they made many mistakes with their cities, agriculture and irrigation programmes, had their "Green" spokesmen too, such as Plato, Lucretius and Ovid.

Derek Wall intends to give Greens the authority of a respectable history, but he also warns them to be aware that many others before them, including socialists and anarchists, have drawn attention to the impact of human civilisation upon the rest of nature.

He mentions the expansionism of capitalism as the current cause of mushrooming ecological impact but, quoting Jonathan Porritt, entirely evades the explanation of why the majority have no choice but to continue abusing the planet's resources and amenities.

Nowhere is there a mention of the subjection and exploitation of the majority of the industrial world's population—the working class—by the capitalist class. Environmental degradation is therefore held up as the fault of us all. And this, of course, is the lameness which has been the cause of repeated disappointment for the political aspirations of Greens. They have no answer to capitalism. They have no agreed understanding of why capitalism plunders and pollutes as it does: and therefore they have no appreciation of what it will take to stop the rape of the world. They act as though they think indignation will be enough - and it won't.

Green History is an interesting book to dip into or, because of its good index, look up topics and writers. But socialists must be prepared for considerable irritation. For example, Bellamy's military-industrial society in Looking Backward is described as "socialist" although Bellamy had expressly rejected the label, preferring to call his scheme "Nationalism". Morris's News from Nowhere, written as a counterblast to Bellamy by an avowed Marxian socialist is, on the other hand, called "eco-utopian" by Wall. Perhaps these really are the terms in which most people today have been encouraged to think. But, for a book which claims to be providing a guide through the history of ideas to reinforce such prejudices betrays a lack of care and precision, eroding confidence in the other comments and conclusions the editor makes.

RC

The Evolution of W. Gallacher (1923)

From the February 1923 issue of the Socialist Standard

Once upon a time the Communists were furious in denunciation of the treachery and reformism of the Labour Party and the I.L.P. No abuse was too violent, and they translated their hostility into deeds by opposing J. R. MacDonald when he fought the Woolwich Bye-election as a Labour Party nominee in 1921.

W. Gallacher wrote in the "Workers' Dreadnought" (Feb., 1920), for the Scottish Workers' Committee, as follows: -

"This Committee is definitely anti-Parliamentarian . . . We represent the revolutionary movement in Scotland . . . For a considerable time time we have been sparring with the official Parliamentarians . . . But this state of affairs cannot continue long. We are winning all along the line. The rank and file of the I.L.P. in Scotland is becoming more and more disgusted with the idea of Parliament, and the Soviets or Workers' Councils are being supported by almost every branch. This is very serious, of course, for the gentlemen who took to politics for a profession, and they are using any and every means to persuade their members to come back into the Parliamentary fold. Revolutionary comrades must not give any support to this gang. Our fight here is going to be a most difficult one. One of the worst features of it will be the treachery of those whose personal ambition is a more compelling force than their regard for the revolution. . . . The official I.L.P. is bitterly opposed to the Third International, the rank and file is for it. Any support of the Parliamentary opportunists is simply playing into the hands of the former."

Later the C.P.G.B. wanted to get into the Labour Party and they began to drop their aggressive tone. Their application was refused, but they persevered with a demand for the "united front." They decided that it was necessary and desirable that the Labour Party should gain a Parliamentary majority as soon as possible. Any person with the least knowledge of the political situation would have realised at once that the greatest service the Communists could do the Labour Party was to declare open war upon it. This would have enabled the Labour Party to repudiate entirely the untrue but damaging charge of coquetting with Socialism and Revolution. As it was, the Communists insisted on supporting Labour men and must have lost them thousands of votes. W. Gallacher (the same W. Gallacher) ran as Communist Parliamentary candidate at Dundee. It was a double-membered  constituency, and the only official Labour man was E. D. Morel, an ex-Liberal strongly critical of the Government's foreign policy, and equally strongly anti-Socialist. Although Morel hotly repudiated Gallacher, Gallacher advised all his supporters to vote for Morel. Morel writes on this in the "Labour Magazine" (Dec., 1922): - 

"Another factor in his (Scrymgeour's) favour was the appearance of Mr. Gallacher, the Communist, who never had the ghost of a chance, but who insisted on every occasion in trying to couple himself up with me, despite my emphatic declaration (and the local Labour Party's official disclaimer) that I was unalterably opposed to Communism. For his own purposes, Mr. Churchill also used the same tactics from the beginning. The result was, that Mr. Gallacher played into Mr. Churchill's hands; that many working women electors, who have no use for Communism, were alarmed, when they got to the booths, to find Mr. Gallacher's representatives coupling my name with his, and "plumped" for Scrymgeour instead of voting  Scrymgeour-Morel; and that lost a number of "silent" voters who, but for the Gallacher-Churchill tactic, would probably have voted for me." 

In spite, however, of the unwelcome Communist "support," Morel got in.

Then only three weeks after he had been telling Dundee workers to vote for Morel, Gallacher expresses the opinion that "It is expected on all sides that there will be a split sooner or later, and that the Morel-Wedgewood crowd would go back to Liberalism" ("The Worker," 9th Dec., 1922). Not only that, but while himself a member of the Party (C.P.G.B.) which has defended its support of reactionary Labourites by the gag about the necessity for "unity," he adds: -

"This is a sort of 'hangman's whip' that will be held over the heads of the Glasgow team (I.L.P men, by the way!). 'Don't split the Party' will be the rallying cry of the moderates, and it will be used to the fullest to keep the others in check."

It is always difficult to understand why some alleged revolutionaries will go to an infinite amount of trouble to avoid recognising an unpalatable truth. Although they cannot wait to  propagate Socialism, they are prepared to go on for ever, alternately denouncing known enemies of the working class and supporting them for "tactical" reasons. They will discard every principle and make themselves personally ridiculous and contemptible by perpetual shuffling, all in order to gain something by manoeuvre which they cannot gain in open fight. They never do get anything worth having, and the working class have to pay the price of failure in the despair of the disappointed followers of these blind leaders. The cause of this lies simply in their refusal to recognise the fact that Socialism cannot be won without Socialists. They shelter behind the excuse that the workers are too ignorant and foolish ever to understand their own interests, but, as Voltaire very shrewdly remarked, "He who dreams that he can lead a great crowd of fools without a great store of knavery is a fool himself."

Edgar Hardcastle 

At the coalface (2005)

Book Review from the May 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

GB84 by David Peace (Faber and Faber £7.99.)

The author describes this novel as 'a fiction based upon a fact', the fact being the 1984 miners' strike (on which see the Socialist Standard for March 2004). 'In a brutally honest style, told from the viewpoints of several different characters, and interspersed with excerpts from the fictional diaries of two striking miners, Peace paints a vivid portrait of the strike and its eventual defeat. A great deal of research underlies the book, and Peace brings out the extent of the ruling class’ preparations for the strike and their determination to beat the miners into submission.

Government fixers and corrupt undercover police are shown doing their dirty work. The divisions and hostilities within mining communities are displayed, and even some working miners are shown in an almost sympathetic light - one says he'd have been on strike had there been a  ballot in favour of strike action. As the strike continues, the NUM become increasingly desperate in attempting to hide their financial assets overseas and out of reach of the government's stooges, while the Coal Board and the Tories seek to undermine the strike by getting almost all activity in support of it declared illegal and subsidising the back-to-work movement.

There are suggestions that the police ranks are being boosted by soldiers, and the extent of police brutality is made plain. The NUM leaders are depicted as pretty paranoid (though possibly with reason) about being bugged and being infiltrated. 'The President' comes over as an increasingly pathetic figure, harking back to his supposed defeat of the Heath government in 1974, and repeating the mantra that support from the wider trade union movement would ensure success. But as the numbers of working miners gradually increase and NUM funds are gradually leached away, he is unable to accept that defeat is ahead, nor that the failure to call a ballot was in any way responsible.

 The true heroes and victims, however, are the striking miners and their families. In the face of dreadful financial hardship, media lies, state violence, the threat of blacklisting and the inevitable petty quarrels of people under stress, they struggle to maintain solidarity and to keep the fight going. As families and friendships fall apart, they still remain committed.

David Peace's novel gives an unforgettable account of a major working class struggle, and, despite the complexity of its structure, is well worth reading.

Paul Bennett

Chains link (1983)

From the September 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

What do most people associate with the name William Wilberforce? Probably if they had been fed on the usual diet of school history books, it is the abolition of slavery. We are told by one common text, for instance, that "Wilberforce sacrificed the prospect of a great political career to devote his whole life to humanitarian causes" (Modern Britain 1783-1964, D. Richards, J. W. Hunt). In fact, when it came to the majority, the working class—also known as the Rabble—Wilberforce's attitude was less than philanthropic. From the close of the eighteenth century until his death in 1833, as the MP for Yorkshire and a prominent politician, he fought a constant crusade to keep the workers in their place. Along with Dr. John Bowdler he founded the Society for the Suppression of Vice and Encouragement of Religion. The message this type of organisation gave to the poor was summarised by Edmund Burke: "Patience, labour, sobriety, frugality and religion should be recommended to them; all the rest is downright fraud".

Wilberforce was himself a member of the owning class and took the view that a religious worker is a meek and docile profit-creator, acquiescent in poverty. If you could teach them, he thought, to forget about their hardships in life and to look forward to a better state of affairs once they were dead, workers would carry on in poverty producing the wealth and handing it over to the capitalists. Meanwhile the rich people would spend the occasional hour in church intoning hypocrisies and wondering whether they could purchase any sufficiently large needles for camels to pass through. Perhaps he was considering the state of his own mind and the sort of company he kept when he wrote: "Remember that we are all fallen creatures, born in sin and naturally depraved. Christianity recognises no innocence or goodness of heart" (A Practical View of Christianity).

Wilberforce's comprehension of human nature (or more accurately human behaviour) was not particularly well-informed. When we are born we have a brain but no mind. We learn a certain language and code of behaviour depending on where and when we enter society. A baby has no innate notions of sin. Sin and all the mental injury and inhibitions that go with it have to be instilled into the child by warning and punishment. In fact some societies today, existing outside the commercial system of wages and capital, have no concept of this sort of superstitious guilt. One such community is the Panare Indian settlement around the Orinoco basin in Venezuela. They organise their production and consumption on the basis of the principle "from each according to ability, to each according to need". They have no leaders or bosses. They have refused to be employed by anyone. They have no inequality of class, sex or age. Ironically they are being evangelised by a civilised horde of American missionaries (The New Tribes Mission) who want to force them, with fear of hellfire, to stop drinking alcohol and enjoying themselves, to work in the local mines for wages and desist from Sin. The trouble was that in the Panare language there was no word for "sin" or "guilt". The idea was not within their social experience. What were the missionaries to do? The method they chose to manufacture guilt among the Panare—upon which repentance and salvation depended—was to re-edit that Middle Eastern book of fables, the Scriptures, so as to implicate the Panare in Christ's death. To avoid divine retribution for this murder the Indians would have to become as mentally lame as the missionaries. Wilberforce's contention that human beings are born with Sin is contradicted everywhere by simple evidence.

In any event, he did have some interest in children. He was in favour of child labour and had small children working for himself. He was a firm opponent of legislation to outlaw such exploitation. His main concern seems to have been that capitalism should be permitted to function without any stroppiness or backchat from those who produce the wealth. In 1797 he expounded the "great law of subordination" and laid down his "articles for the management of the poor" in which he said

that their more lowly path has been allotted to them by the hand of God; that it is their part faithfully to discharge its duties and contentedly to bear its inconveniences; that the present state of things is very short; that the objects about which worldly men conflict so eagerly are not worth the contest. (A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians)

Even his campaigns against the slave trade were not quite as simple as they are often made out to be. A factor not entirely out of Wilberforce's consideration when opposing the importation of slaves to Britain was the fact that many industrial capitalists were having their goods undercut in the market by goods which had been produced with slave (unpaid) labour owned by capitalists who had easy access (mostly near the ports) to this workforce. The abolition of the slave trade would put rival capitalists on a more equal footing.

Wilberforce was energetically opposed to Trade Unionism in a fashion which would inspire Norman Tebbit, General Jaruzelski and Andropov. He devised the 1799 Workmen's Combination Bill which completely prohibited the formation of any association which was, or could be possibly construed as, a combination of workers. This year is the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his death. At a commemorative service in Westminster Abbey held in July, Margaret Thatcher read the lesson. Like the sanctimonious Wilberforce, Thatcher had some disapproval for shackle slavery, while advocating that in the servitude of wage-slavery the workers are milked for as much as the wage-slave-owning bosses can get. We are tethered to a life of working for the boss or living off the dole; of boring routines and consuming, if we are fortunate, bland, second-rate goods and services; of being screwed up by the dehumanising effects of relating to each other so often on the basis of buying and selling. We are only really tethered to this social system because of the mentality of wage-slavery. The consent of the majority which the minority needs to keep its system going. We must unite to change society. We have nothing to lose . . .

Gary Jay 

Classical Leninism (2003)

Book Review from the September 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Classical Marxism. By David Renton. New Clarion Press. 2002.

There is a tradition of ideas that can be termed Classical Leninism. According to this tradition, classical Marxism was betrayed by a number of key leaders until the collapse of the Second International in the First World War, leaving the way clear for Lenin and the Bolsheviks to carry the flag of socialist revolution. This is the “Great Man” theory of history, and even though this book includes two women in its collection of biographies, the leader fixation remains the same.

Marx played a prominent role in the formation of the International Working Men's Association (1864-1876), which became better known as the First International. This was an international federation of working class organisations based on the principle that the emancipation of the working class could only be achieved by the working class itself. Renton argues that the Second International (1889-1914) was set up as an explicitly Marxist organisation but went on to distort Marx's ideas to suit their own purposes. This was the era of “classical Marxism” and Karl Kautsky was its leading theoretician. Kautsky was the “Pope” of Marxism in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Second International. He is the main bogeyman in classical Leninism.

But there can be no doubt that Kautsky did distort Marx, in particular his support for reformism. Kautsky, Lenin and Renton are agreed that parliamentary action must be reformist. However, this is not Marx's conclusion, as he wrote in 1881 of workers' struggles being “pursued by all the means which the proletariat has at its disposal, including universal suffrage, thus transformed from the instrument of trickery which it has been up till now into an instrument of emancipation” (Link) and other writings by Marx. There is no reason why parliamentary institutions could not be used by a class-conscious socialist majority to win power for the socialist revolution, and this is the position adopted by the Socialist Party at its formation in June 1904. Delegates were sent from the Socialist Party to the Amsterdam Congress of the Second International in August 1904, but, after seeing the reformism rampant within it, soon decided to have no more to do with it. When the leaders of the SPD voted for war credits in 1914 it came as a shock to Lenin and at first he refused to believe the news. The Socialist Party, on the other hand, had long warned of SPD support for militarism (see Link).

The fact is the Second International, the Third (Leninist) International (1919-1943) and the Fourth (Trotskyite) International (1938 onwards) have all distorted Marx for their own purposes. The main, but by no means only distortion by Lenin concerns the vanguard party. Lenin argued that workers were incapable of self-emancipation and instead must be freed from above by professional revolutionaries who have the workers' best interests at heart. (Renton points out that this is similar to Kautsky's position.) But Marx and Engels profoundly disagreed, as they made clear in a circular to the SPD in 1879:

“At the founding of the International we expressly formulated the battle cry: The emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself. Hence we cannot co-operate with men who say openly that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves, and must first be emancipated from above by philanthropic members of the upper and lower middle classes” (Link).

So what is left of Marxism? Renton prefaces his book with a quote from an incredulous Trotsky: “None of those who propose to renounce Bolshevism as an historically bankrupt tendency has indicated any other course.” The Socialist Party has argued that the answer is to be found in the self-activity of the working class. For as Rosa Luxemburg wrote in Leninism or Marxism?: “Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee” and “The working class demands the right to make its mistakes and learn the dialectic of history”(Link).

Lew Higgins

Cooking the Books: Capitalism for ever? (2006)

The Cooking the Books column from the April 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 2 March Jacques Attali, author of a recent biography of Marx in French (and former top adviser to President Mitterrand and former head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development), gave a talk with historian Eric Hobsbawm on “Marx for the 21st century” at the Jewish Book Fair in London.

Interviewed in the Guardian (25 February) he was reported as saying:

“Contrary to popular belief, Marx was not mistaken: capitalism will fall and be replaced by a socialist system. The only question is when. ‘For Marx the fall of the rate of profit will appear when capitalism has exhausted its capacity for growth, which is not the case,’ he says. ‘Socialism will come after this.’”

Marx did indeed think that capitalism would prepare the way for and eventually be replaced by socialism (which Attali correctly identifies, both in his book and in his talk, as a world non-market society in which money will have no place and in which goods and services will be freely available for people to take and use). And he could be interpreted as having argued (in the Grundrisse, in the section in Notebook VII on “Contradiction between the foundations of bourgeois production (value as measure) and its development“) that, if capitalism were to continue long enough, productivity would eventually rise to such a level that the unit price of goods would fall so low (their labour-time content being so small) that they would be virtually free and that the prospect of making a profit would therefore be so low that the economic mechanism of capitalism would seize up.

Attali’s reported answer here implies that Marx really thought that socialism would only come when capitalism had reached that stage. Which it clearly hasn’t. So, capitalism would still have some way to go, until in fact it had not only come to dominate the globe (as at present and for at least a century) but had come to exist everywhere including in the currently “undeveloped” parts of the world in Asia, Latin America and Africa. Until, in short, capitalist globalisation had run its full course.

Marx certainly thought that in his day capitalism still had some years to go before it could be replaced by socialism (which is why he supported non-socialist developments within capitalism which he thought would speed up the development of capitalism and with it the material basis for socialism, such as free trade, the victory of the North in the American Civil War, and German unity). But it is doubtful whether the passage from the Grundrisse was anything more than Marx saying what would eventually happen if capitalism were to go on for long enough. In other words, that there were theoretical reasons why capitalism could not literally go on forever. It did have an economic limit, even if this would be far into the future.

Marx can’t be interpreted as saying that capitalism would, or should, continue for that long. His activities as a revolutionary socialist clearly showed that, on the contrary, he thought that capitalism could, and should, be ended by conscious working class action long before it reached its theoretical limit.

Material World: This Land is Our Land (2011)

The Material World Column from the November 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

There was a time when 'land' used to refer to those parts of our habitat that were cultivated for food, grazed by animals for hide, wool, meat, milk and fertilisation, and to forests from which timber, firewood and food were collected and also to where communities lived sharing the common wealth. Now, as with everything else one can imagine, land is just another commodity to be bought and sold at the best possible price and to be acquired whatever the consequences for long-term incumbents. So too is everything it can offer – food, fuel, minerals and water – with the added bonus of investment and speculation.

The phenomenon of 'land-grab', well known now, was originally seen as a way for food insecure and rich countries such as Saudi Arabia and China to gain access to foreign farmland in order to meet the food needs of their own populations. Then came the big push for biofuels following targets agreed by governments at a succession of meetings on climate change. The Worldwatch Institute recently reported that rural populations have been pushed off prime land in 25 sub-Saharan countries for the production of biofuel crops for foreign nations. In other examples, food is grown on an industrial scale solely for export, disenfranchising local populations and turning them into wage labourers if they are lucky, and forcing them into urban areas and likely penury if they are not.

The most exciting opportunity now for big money seeking even bigger money is that of investment and speculation in both food and land. Pension schemes, universities, bankers and large investors are jostling to invest in land for speculation. According to one spokesperson for a large company fund, it doesn't matter if nothing is grown for ten years, you'll still 'turn a good profit.' Pension funds globally run to around $23 trillion. Their investment in land and agriculture is relatively recent but growing fast and admitted by some investment bankers and civil society organisations to be a major cause of rising food prices globally.

At the World Social Forum in Dakar, Senegal, this February an appeal against land-grabbing was launched. By September over 650 organisations had endorsed it. Estimates of land the size of western Europe (227 million hectares) have been sold, leased or licensed in the last decade. One Oxfam case study found at least 22,500 people lost both homes and land in Uganda when they were evicted in favour of a British company, the New Forest Company. There were conflicting versions from the company and from the evicted, but a high court order to restrain evictions was sidestepped and the company put the responsibility onto the Ugandan National Forest Authority. There are numerous accounts of promised benefits to displaced persons and communities not materialising even after several years of waiting. Efforts to draw up and implement regulations for the protection of local populations, even voluntary ones, have been less than robust.

In India government policy is to dispossess its own population. Prime Minister Singh has stated that 70 percent of India's farming population is surplus to requirements and that this surplus must be resettled in urban areas where 1,000 training institutions are being set up to facilitate new employment opportunities. Devinder Sharma, academic and commentator, says that this will be the world's biggest environmental displacement and that what is needed is a production system by the masses not for the masses. He says this policy will add another 95 million to the urban population within a decade, forcing farmers to abandon agriculture, usurping land, water and natural resources in the name of development. In West Bengal, Orissa and Uttar Pradesh fertile land has been taken for industrial development, residential development, businesses and Special Economic Zones whilst big corporations acquire land in other countries, specifically African countries, for development of agribusinesses to cultivate crops for Indian consumption. More than 80 companies have so far acquired land through direct negotiations with host governments but without input from the affected farmers. 1.8 million hectares in Ethiopia alone have changed hands this way to the detriment of small farmers in both countries. 250,000 Indian farmers committed suicide in the last 15 years. In the last decade more than two million hectares of farmland (equal in size to the whole of Kerala state) have been acquired for non-farm purposes, and studies show that India will be a major food importer by 2017-8.

The countries of Africa have been a major target for land-grab with agriculture on an industrial scale reaping substantial profits for investors. Corporate agriculture, however, is not about food production or satisfying the needs of the undernourished or downright starving but about producing profit. How long can it be at this rate before its limits are reached – dispossessed millions starved to death in favour of a tidy accumulation for the few? A lengthy study by the Oakland Institute in Tanzania, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Mali, Mozambique, Zambia and South Sudan looked at the viability of industrial-scale farming compared with small family farms. What they found was that where 100,000 hectares of plantations would employ 1,000 workers, traditional agriculture of the same area would sustain 50,000 families, that is between 200-250,000 people.

This land is our land. Reclaiming the commons for the peoples of the world is a vital part of the socialist revolution.

Janet Surman

Obituaries: L. E. Weidberg and Stan C. Bathurst (1986)

Obituaries from the June 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

L. E. Weidberg

It is with regret that we report the death, after a long illness, of L. E. Weidberg who first joined Manchester branch of The Socialist Party in the 1930s. He read a copy of the Socialist Standard in the public library and was convinced instantly.

Laurie was a socialist eccentric—infuriatingly rude and dogmatic, lovably sharp-witted and passionate. Rarely did I have a conversation with him without finding reasons to expel him from the Party and other reasons to admire him: he was a most appealing rascal, a fellow who could (and did) provoke vicars to swear at him and who always seemed to have riots imminent within the vicinity of his presence. I have never witnesses a better socialist heckler—he must have been given his training by Moses Baritz, the man who blew his clarinet down the ventilator shaft of an SDF meeting from which he had been barred. As a speaker on the outdoor platform at Hyde Park and Lincoln's Inn, his oratory was always much to the point, usually funny, often vulgar and sometimes bloody offensive. His articles in the Socialist Standard possessed all of those characteristics, not least when he was laying in to his pet hate: the Guardian newspaper and its soggy bourgeois liberalism—or "half-baked lefty crap" as Laurie would put it. He worked hard for the Party as a tireless speaker, an EC member for one noisy year, a regular writer and a good friend to the new, younger members who were with him in Islington branch in which he spent his last years in the Party. In the branch he showed himself to possess unusual humility which allowed him to listen to and learn from others combined with the temper of one who took to co-operation like a duck takes to concrete.

For some years Laurie was very ill and knew that he was soon to die. It was this that led him to leave the Party, wrongly concluding that the working class are "a bleeding waste of time". But as a healthy, active man he was second to few in his unrestrained effort to knock socialist sense into the heads of workers. He will be missed by those of us who remember, and persist in, those efforts and our sympathy goes to his widow, sister and three sons.

S.C.

Stan C. Bathurst

It is with much regret that we report the death of Stan Bathurst, on 2 March, at the age of 80.

Between the wars, Stan's active membership of the Labour Party inevitably brought him into contact with the real socialist message of the SPGB but it was not until the late forties that he came to understand and accept the Party's principles. This came about through his association with the late comrade Bowie, when they were both employed as insurance agents in the south Essex area.

Membership of the Southend Branch in 1951 saw the commencement of Stan's active involvement in the Party's work for socialism. He took a full part in branch affairs and activities, acting as Treasurer for a number of years, canvassing and selling or distributing literature and worked hard during these special campaigns such as publicising the Party message in the run up to general or bye-elections.

Failing health since 1982 necessitated a decline in Stan's activities but he continued writing to local newspapers and selling the Socialist Standard in Basildon and Stanford. Even in the last week of his life, Stan organised distribution of the Standard to his regular purchasers from his hospital bed.

Stan's metier was the personal, one-to-one approach. Canvassing on countless doorsteps was his chief enjoyment and his employment as an insurance agent lent itself well to this type of activity. He derived much satisfaction from spreading the party message in the boss's time.

Stan's industrious and independent outlook led to a number of small but not insignificant achievements in his personal life. For example he built, more or less single-handed, two substantial family homes and made many improvements to a third. These and other achievements were realised mainly by dogged pegging away with limited resources to reach the desired target. Such an approach was mirrored in Stan's Party work where he felt that persistence would get eventual rewards.

The funeral was a simple but moving affair. The Party was well represented and comrade Pat Wilson gave a valedictory address on Stan's Party membership.

Stan leaves a widower and two sons, both of whom are Party members.

World Without Wages (1982)

Book Review from the April 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is a rare treat to review a book that claims to be about socialism which is not bursting with misconceptions and illusions. Samuel Leight's World Without Wages is not only readable (which contrasts sharply with those academic "Marxist" tracts written in language that only the initiated can comprehend), but it is full of the kind of basic socialist arguments which every open-minded worker will want to know about. There are fifty chapters and two hundred and twenty-nine pages, so it is possible to read the book in stages, absorbing the case for socialism bit by bit.

Samuel Leight is a member of the World Socialist Party of the United States, a companion party of the SPGB. World Without Money is based on talks given by him on KTUC radio station in Tucson, Arizona. From the first page the writer loses no time in providing the basic message:

Visualise with us a completely different economic, world-wide system of society. Within this system all the means of production and distribution that exist on the face of the earth will be owned and democratically controlled by the whole of society. Each person will stand in exactly the same economic relationship to the instruments for producing and distributing wealth. There will be no class owning and there will be no non-owning class—it will be a classless society. Goods and services will be produced and distributed solely for use and not for profit. People will contribute according to their individual ability, taking from society according to their needs. This means literally free access to whatever they require. Visualise then a system in which there will be no means of exchange, no money, no barter. A system wherein there will be no capitalist class paying wages, with no employers or employees. Such a system cannot operate in one country, as no one country is economically self-sufficient; nor can it be inaugurated until the vast majority understand its economic and social implications.

Recognising that socialism is "possibly the most abused, misused, misunderstood term in the English language", Leight makes no assumptions about his readers' acquaintance with the terms he is using; the socialist case is explained with the kind of clarity that only a real desire to communicate can achieve. Academic writers on the Left—especially those of the New Left Review type—often deter working class intellectual interest by the use of pretentious jargon. By contrast, Leight's approach is that of classical, down-to-earth Marxism—Marxism according to Marx, not Lenin, Trotsky, Mao or Mugabe. The class struggle, recognition of which is the basis of the socialist movement, is clearly explained:

In a society wherein the vast majority are non-owners of wealth production and distribution and a minority are the owners, a conflict of interest must exist . . .  We acknowledge the absolute necessity of Trade Unions under capitalism, and we support the active participation of workers within the Trade Union movement in their attempts to safeguard, and improve, their wage levels and working conditions. At the same time we also fully realise the limitations of the Trade Unions . . . We are the sole advocates of the highest expression of the class struggle on the political field—the demand for the abolition of class society, together with the class struggle, through the establishment of socialism.

The key to capitalism's "closely guarded secret"—the appropriation of surplus value by the capitalist class—is well brought out in Chapter 22 on The Wages System:

Most workers spend a lifetime blissfully unaware of the fact that as a class they are being legally robbed when they produce values equal to their pay cheques, but then continue producing excess values for the bosses. 

There are chapters on war, human nature, Russian state capitalism, nationalisation, racism, ecology, charity, leadership, and the materialist conception of history—as well as chapters dealing with recent events in American labour history. Were this writer not a committed socialist he would have been convinced to become one by reading Samuel Leight's book. World Without Wages is distributed in Britain by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, and costs £3.50, including postage and packing. Don't just buy a copy for yourself; buy one for your best friend and another for your worst enemy.

Steve Coleman 

Argh! The Movie (2013)

Film Review from the World Socialist Party of the United States website

March 16, 2013

Well, I just had to do it: go see this movie everyone was talking about. Let’s just say that Argo has more in common with Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream than with Jason and the Argonauts searching for the golden fleece. The film features a fake movie (“Argo”) “produced” by the Central Intelligence Agency to rescue six U.S. nationals from the Canadian embassy in Teheran when the overthrown Shah of Iran, himself devilishly imposed on the Iranians by the U.S., was granted asylum in the United States. Hollywood producers were enlisted in an effort to make the pseudo-film “look real” to the enraged bazaaris who had put “Islamic Republics” on the political map.

This had to be the ultimate irony for a capitalism that has come to rely on Big Lies and Newspeak: to be invoking the semblance of make-believe fiction (the nonexistent movie Argo) in the cause of a simulated lie required by the intricacies of realpolitik, which itself resolutely excludes any concern with what really goes on in society. Argo is based on “real” events. But the spectacle of the CIA immersing itself in Hollywood hijinks reminds us of how grotesquely unreal the thought processes of the capitalist class really are.

At different points we hear a voice-over of what sounds like a running Aljazeera commentary on the “Great Satan’s” foreign policy, enunciated by a woman in clear and correct American English (with albeit a trace Arab accent). The points scored in these voice-overs are criticisms well known to all Lefties. Plainly, the producers wanted the audience to grasp the real political implications of the action; they were not presenting a Disneyfied adventure sealed off in a social vacuum. Which is remarkable in a film that manifestly glorifies the CIA as a sort of collective Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jean-Claude Van Damme.

So the fake movie “Argo” embedded in the “real” movie Argo is homologous to the play within the play “Pyramus and Thisbe” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, maintaining all the while an arm’s-length relation with a tenuously sensed real world in which capital, wages and class struggle, yes, do exist out there somewhere, but in a weirdly inverted way. You catch yourself wondering why this is such a cliff-hanger. The very real drama of the daily struggle that capitalists have reduced life to appears in the movie like so many googly-eyed tourists peering in through the glass walls of an aquarium.

Looming over this whole nefarious, psychotic maze stalks the specter of an organization that trains killers and torturers (the U.S. government), and globally promotes the interests of capital centered around the fairy tale of (U.S.) national security. Wherever it can attack efforts by the working class to organize itself, it does, often by remote control in a dismally repetitive pattern. (“Argo” was coincidentally “produced” in 1979 under the same benevolent Carter Administration that both laid the basis in El Salvador for the Reagan Administration’s bloody fairy tales and “intervened” in Afghanistan, materially contributing to the emergence of al Qaeda.) Innernashnal Commanism was out to git us. No time to waste! The Tough had to get going.

The CIA is deeply implicated in all this myth-making machinery, so it is no surprise that one of its operatives should have ingeniously suggested “producing” a fake movie in a moment of “real” crisis in Iran. At the Company they don’t fool around: they are no strangers to the vicious, the lethal and the ugly. The politic bow-ties upstairs are as good at hiring thugs as generals are supposed to be at setting up episodes of calculated mass murder. Argo lights up a sordid episode that fueled what must have been a heart-pounding experience for all of its participants. A good story, sure — but why must we have to stand on our heads to make sense of it?

The producers thankfully give the audience a chance to swim back up to get a lungful of reality when they show us a moment of celebration occurring at the end, with CIA personnel (presumably at their headquarters in Langley, Virginia) jumping up and down, high-fiving each other like scientists at Mission Control cheering a successful Mars landing. So now the Agency can get back to its Usual Business of knifing opposition movements in the back, maybe? Or of improving on the truth, or taking down the concept of “intelligence” out back in the alley?

The question all this begs is, of course, why governments do such things in the first place. But while the answer ought to be as plain as the nose on your face — that this is the road they must take to defend the interests of capital — spectacle and drama seem to be the decisive factors in shaping what we call “public opinion.” The sad fact is that the world’s working class has lost its way in the confusing hallucinations of a global capitalism that courts its victims’ political approval even as it clobbers them economically.

Yet when you leave the theater, if you tune in to the distant rumbles of global warming that persistently chatter like some sort of Langoliers at the fringes of your sense of reality, you might justifiably begin to doubt at least pieces of Capital’s Big Lie. Should it finally come to pass that a general consensus arises, that not just the capitalist class but capital itself bears the responsibility for triggering an age of ecological surprises, it is fascinating to speculate how society might receive capital’s cold-blooded refusal to shoulder that responsibility. Could a moment of truth perhaps be approaching, in which the capitalists figuratively get their heads handed to them on a platter, reminiscent of the French landed aristocracy that warm June day in 1789? For one of the truths of history is that increasingly tiny and powerful economic élites do not make good survival decisions for the rest of us. Once the ice caps disappear, our future will be indisputably on the line.

So, you want a gripping story? Try imagining a socialist revolution on a world scale following capital’s quasi-tragic attempts to break lances with Mother Nature.

ROEL

What About the Roma? (2014)

From the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you believe UKIP by the time you read this millions of Romanians and Bulgarians will have arrived in Britain, many of them Roma. This is nonsense of course, but who are the Roma?.

Nazi genocide was not limited to the Jewish population. An estimated 800,000 Roma were murdered in Nazi-occupied Europe, an episode that has come to be known in the Romani language as the Porraimos (the ‘devouring’), or Romani holocaust. When Hitler started his ethnic cleansing of the gypsies he inherited elaborate discriminatory legislation specifically designed to keep the gypsies away. Germany had anti-gypsy laws since the end of the 19th century. During the early days of Nazism, existing anti-gypsy measures were strengthened and led to mass sterilisation and murder.

The history of the Roma (more commonly called gypsies) in Europe is a tragic one. Migrating from northern India to Europe in the eleventh century, most Roma live today in eastern and central Europe, particularly in Romania and Bulgaria, with many large communities in other European countries. In the parts of the Ottoman Empire today located in modern-day Romania, they have endured persecution and enslavement at the hands of landowners and clergy since the Middle Ages, being emancipated from slavery only in the mid-nineteenth century. The Romanian author Mircea Cartarescu described a life of misery:

’For centuries they could be bought and sold, families were torn apart, children taken from their mothers, women separated from their men. The young women were generally raped by their owners and the 'flock of crows', as they were called, was the target of general contempt and discrimination. One of the voivodes, or provincial governors, used to have them climb trees and then shot them down with arrows. He called it crow-hunting. Tied to one place and kept like animals, the gypsies multiplied more quickly in the Romanian principalities than anywhere else in Europe. Therefore we only have ourselves to blame for creating the gypsy problem. It is our historical guilt... We are appalled when other countries perceive us as a nation of criminals, but we see the gypsies in exactly the same way.’

After the Second World War in ’communist’ eastern Europe, the state set about targeting Roma, with social policies aimed to settle them forcibly and to eradicate ’anti-social traits’. Despite efforts to socially engineer their assimilation, the vast majority of Roma remained marginalised and discriminated against by both state and society. Anti-Roma racism across Europe has remained rampant. In many countries, segregation in schooling and housing is still a fact of life, social attitudes towards Roma are poisonous and pogroms are not unknown. Negative social attitudes and disastrous state policies toward the Roma has resulted in the reinforcement of the very conditions that contribute to their continued marginalisation, including low literacy levels, poverty, poor housing, poor health and low life expectancy. Throughout Europe reports of violence against the Roma have increased significantly, particularly in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, where extremist and openly racist groups and political parties are gaining in popularity.

There are an estimated million Roma in Hungary, making up one tenth of the population. During the Communist Party rule, social policies encouraged large families and those with three children or more were virtually guaranteed an unconditional mortgage loan. Such financial incentives allowed many Roma to build their own homes. But since the collapse of the former state capitalist system, Hungarians receive less than 50 dollars per child and with the slow Hungarian economy, many Roma are struggling to find work and feed their large families. The previous ’Communist’ regime refused to regard the gypsies as a minority, but as a social problem - undisciplined proletarians who needed to be forced into the same mould as the rest. They were accordingly given poor-quality worker housing with those very cheap mortgages, and obliged to toil, like everybody else. The regime didn't want them to get more education because they needed cheap unskilled labour. But when that system abruptly collapsed in 1989 the Communists' uneconomic factories and plants closed down. It was the unskilled workers at the bottom – the Roma in particular – who were left high and dry. Roma unemployment shot up from 15 percent to 85 percent in two years.

In the absence of work there was now welfare. Milking the system became a survival strategy. A Roma family would live off welfare, which arrives on the fifth of the month. By the money would run out, so they would run up credit at the local shop, and the men of the family would get a few days' casual work, building walls, fixing roofs, in the neighbourhood. But with the financial crisis, credit stopped and people stopped spending money and the work dried up. For the Roma the economic crisis has driven them to the wall, perhaps a bit more than for the rest of us. With increasing poverty amongst the Roma in Eastern Europe, it is hardly surprising that families travel to other countries in order to find work.

Throughout their history the Roma have had good reason to be mistrustful of authorities, and have survived at the absolute margins of society. Europe's roughly 10 million Roma remain the poorest of the poor, often migrating abroad in search of work. In several eastern European countries there is a war against the Roma. There are marches against them. Self-proclaimed vigilantes bully and threaten them. Walls are built around the sections of town where they live. Their houses are set on fire. They are forced out of their homes and sometimes brutally murdered. Almost everywhere, the authorities have stood aside. In 1993, after three Roma in the Romanian village of Hadareni were lynched with the involvement of the police, the government, in its official explanation, expressed understanding for the ’anger of the villagers’.

These and events since has prompted tens of thousands of them, primarily from Romania and Bulgaria, to head west. Roma refugees have come to Italy, France, UK, and to Germany. In the western European countries they work for a couple of euros an hour doing cleaning, construction, or they beg. Some steal. For many, it is more than they could have ever imagined in their home countries. Those who fight for Roma rights make the argument that those who head to the West are as much political refugees as they are economic ones.

The Roma suffer threefold prejudice in the UK. Firstly because they are gypsies, secondly because they are often asylum seekers or refugees and thirdly because many are Romanian. The Roma are easy scapegoats. They're at the bottom of society and have no effective political lobby. In 2012 the European Parliament had only one member of Roma origin. 90,000 to 120,000 Roma are estimated to be in the UK, a fraction of the one million gypsies who live in France and Germany. Next year, the quotas which let EU countries limit the number of Bulgarian and Romanian migrants crossing their borders will be lifted. Britain wants to deter them from crossing the Channel and is financing an anti-migrant ad campaign in those countries. Suspicions have been raised that what the UK Government really fears – but dares not say publicly – is the mass migration of Roma.

It is not difficult to believe that the government's very public stance against eastern European (aka Roma) immigration is fuelled largely by a desire to appeal to the populist vote and is a demagogic tactic aimed at seducing the far right. Each year we are reminded by the government of the day to remember the Jewish Holocaust, yet the Roma Devouring stays forgotten. August the 2nd is the Roma Holocaust Memorial Day, marking the start of the liquidation by the Nazis of the ’gypsy’ camp at Auschwitz. The silence of British politicians was deafening. Our rulers have a long history of camouflaging the failures of capitalism, particularly in times of economic slump, by seeking out scapegoats.

ALJO